Andy Warhol

No other artist is as much identified with Pop Art as Andy Warhol. The media called him the Prince of Pop. Warhol’s work is found in every museum internationally including: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Guggenheim Bibao, Spain; Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany; Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Saint Louis, Missouri; Norwich Museum, England; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London, UK among many.

Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, an avant-garde filmmaker, a record producer, an author, and a public figure known for his membership in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats. The quintessence of Andy Warhol art was to remove the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns. Warhol once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence: "When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums". The pop artist not only depicted mass products but he also wanted to mass produce his own works of pop art. Consequently he founded The Factory in 1962. It was an art studio where he employed in a rather chaotic way "art workers" to mass produce mainly prints and posters. In July of 1968 the pop artist was shot three times and narrowly escaped death. After this assassination attempt the pop artist made a radical turn in his process of producing art. The philosopher of art mass production now spent most of his time making individual portraits of the rich and affluent of his time like Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson or Brigitte Bardot. Warhol once said “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.

Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987, and following a ten-day auction of his enormous estate of art and antiques raised over 20 million dollars for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Andy Warhol Museum was announced in 1989, and opened in Pittsburgh in 1994.